Practices for monitoring a network's performance
What are some good management practices for monitoring a network's performance?
"Best Practices" have a short half-life in our industry. The biggest problem I see with today's management techniques and tools is that they grew up in the client/server era and haven't evolved to serve today's realities.
In the old world...
you owned or controlled most of the networks your key applications depended on
you could predict where critical traffic would flow
complex, long-deployment, agent-based systems were approved for deployment because the problems client/server created were new, acute and very scary
you dealt with a dog's breakfast of vendor-specific protocols
In today's world...
you depend on networks you do not own or control (ISP, ASP, customer, supplier, etc.)
you can't predict where tomorrow's traffic will flow or what will break next
there is less (no?) time and money for deployment or maintenance of big, complex network management systems
it's "IP everything/everywhere"
So what should "best practices" look like?
I'll save the long version for a proper whitepaper (due out June 2003 from www.jaalam.com/wp/). But the short version might go like this:
Be able to see end-to-end, from the application's view point
Be able to deploy "Just in time" network management infrastructure - rapidly, where needed, when needed, on demand
Be able to see into and through networks that you don't own
Employ monitoring technologies that provide thorough network awareness on an on-going basis, not piece-meal views
Rely less on trend analysis and more on real-time assessment
Emphasize "effective" over "absolute" - implement management solutions that resolve your most common, most expensive problems most quickly
Focus on application performance after the fundamental networking performance aspects have been addressed
Use methodologies and technologies that fit your network and needs, not the other way around
The approach to this might be laid out in two steps:
1. Continuous monitoring of performance (not just availability) as a essential starting point, ideally at the layer 3 or 4 demarcation point (at a minimum) so you can separate network performance issues from application ones quickly. This has to be end-to-end along all critical paths, and most others of interest, with constant updating.
2. Rapid response to performance problems that slip through the cracks. That requires a real-time measurement/assessment/problem diagnosis capability that delivers quickly, without pre-deployed infrastructure, and can be used remotely.
This was first published in March 2003
Network Management Strategies for the CIO
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